Visual system's adjustments to illuminant changes: heuristic-based model revisited

Color constancy

A quarter of a century ago, the first systematic behavioral experiments were performed to clarify the nature of color constancy-the effect whereby the perceived color of a surface remains constant despite changes in the spectrum of the illumination. At about the same time, new models of color constancy appeared, along with physiological data on cortical mechanisms and photographic colorimetric measurements of natural scenes. Since then, as this review shows, there have been many advances. The theoretical requirements for constancy have been better delineated and the range of experimental techniques has been greatly expanded; novel invariant properties of images and a variety of neural mechanisms have been identified; and increasing recognition has been given to the relevance of natural surfaces and scenes as laboratory stimuli. Even so, there remain many theoretical and experimental challenges, not least to develop an account of color constancy that goes beyond deterministic and relatively simple laboratory stimuli and instead deals with the intrinsically variable nature of surfaces and illuminations present in the natural world.

Cues and strategies for color constancy: perceptual scission, image junctions and transformational color matching

The identification of objects, illuminants, and transparencies are probably the most important perceptual functions of color. This paper examines the effects of perceptual scission, image junctions, color adaptation, and color correlations on identification. Simulations of natural illuminants, materials, and filters were used in a forced-choice procedure to simultaneously measure thresholds for identifying filters and objects across illuminants, and discrimination thresholds within illuminants. In the vast majority of the cases, if observers could discriminate within illuminants they could identify across illuminants. Since results were similar for identical color distributions, whether transparency cues like X-junctions were present or not, the primary cues for color identification were systematic color shifts across illuminants. These color shifts can be well described by three-parameter affine transformations, and the parameters can be derived from differences and ratios of mean chromaticities. A strategy based on post-transformation color matching predicts generally accurate identification despite perceptible color shifts, and also provides plausible reasons for those few conditions where identification thresholds are significantly higher than discrimination thresholds.